• 1: Music and Expressiveness


• 2: Music and the Arousal of Emotion


• 3: The Content of Music


• 4: Music and Lyrics


• 5: The Value of Music


• Bibliography

James O. Young is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Global Anti-realism (Avebury, 1995), Art and Knowledge (Routledge, 2001), Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and more than fifty articles in refereed journals. He is the editor of Aesthetics: The Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2005) and (with Conrad G. Brunk) The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.